Neil Midgley writes about media for The Daily Telegraph, in between ice skating and tweeting - he's @neilmidgley on Twitter

More drama at ITV

It's really hard to write any kind of commentary about the management of ITV without resorting to some groan-inducing pun about it being a soap opera or a talent contest. But today, my headline is at least justified: in announcing ITV's half-year results this morning, and the fruits of its strategy review to boot, new chief executive Adam Crozier said that he wants the broadcaster to make more drama. (He wants it to make more light entertainment as well, but that doesn't translate into such a good headline.)

Crozier and ITV's chairman Archie Norman gave their press conference today – their first together since taking the helm at ITV earlier this year – at the offices of JP Morgan Cazenove in the City. The location was redolent of a new sharpness to ITV's management – gone, now, are the chummy avuncular voices of Michael Grade and John Cresswell, and in their place the steely double-act of Norman and Crozier.

The pair are part of a new wave of very hard-headed management that is sweeping across British commercial television: David Abraham, the new CEO of Channel 4, gave an equally uncompromising performance in presenting C4's annual report a few weeks ago.

Norman acknowledged that much of what they want to achieve at ITV – greater online revenues, greater profits from international programme sales, for example – has been hoped for, out loud, by previous management regimes, including Grade's. Unlike Grade, who set specific financial targets (which he then had to abandon), Norman and Crozier didn't share with the press the numbers that they are hoping to achieve from their five-year Transformation Plan. What they did do was to explain in some detail how they propose to achieve it – and it's going to be an uphill struggle.

Take drama as just one example. Crozier wants long-running, returnable series, made by ITV Studios, shown on ITV1, which can be exported around the world – a triple whammy of bottom-line goodness for ITV plc. So to that extent, Crozier is talking common sense – indeed, these were exactly the kind of series that then-network chief Simon Shaps was actively seeking three or four years ago.

But there's a snag. Rather a big snag, in fact: with the exception of soaps and Doctor Who, we just don't make TV drama in that way in the UK. In the US, studios and networks are geared up for habitual runs of 13 or 22 episodes. Writers genuflect before showrunners, and are used to working in teams – or, at least, to writing individual episodes of long-running shows as part of a larger pool of writers. That's how it is over there, and the size of the US market, combined with a huge international appetite for US shows, pays those writers enough to swallow their amour-propre.

In the UK, we don't pay our TV writers very much. They get their satisfaction from seeing their 'authored pieces' run for just one or two or three episodes as a stand-alone event. We get a lot of great dramas this way: Peter Bowker's Occupation, for example, or Guy Hibbert's Five Minutes of Heaven. What we don't get is commercial juggernauts. Despite their frequent grumbles about interfering BBC execs, British drama writers are used to having a lot of creative freedom. The best ones don't want to be part of a faceless team churning out 10 or more episodes a year, and they're unlikely to change their minds about that just to make sure Crozier gets paid his bonus.

I could go on. Top British actors don't want to sign up for long runs of domestic TV dramas, as it cramps their style in the West End and Hollywood. Commissioning 13 episodes is a great move if your show is a hit, but it looks less inspired if the ratings tank.

In other words, there are good and sensible commercial as well as creative reasons why ITV's programming chief Peter Fincham and drama head Laura Mackie have focused on short-run drama hits such as Whitechapel, Above Suspicion and Unforgiven.

Other items on the Crozier wishlist come with similar health warnings. Pay-TV is great for pay-TV providers, but I can't think of a broadcaster (even in the US) that has successfully parlayed free-to-air network fare into a large-scale, subscription-only proposition. Micropayments, too, would be super online. But do people readily pay for TV episodes even on established online platforms such as iTunes? No.

Crozier and Norman were, truly, a rousing pair today. It's good to see ITV under such bracing leadership, and with such revolutionary ideas. As they pointed out, reinventing ITV for the digital, globalised era is a necessity. What is less certain is whether even Adam and Archie can reinvent the way British television works – which might just be what they end up having to do.